Recognizing there has been no post activity on my part for over a year, I was debating whether or not to continue to post. Noting my last post was about haying, maybe I'll skip a year, speak to this year's haying, then move along.
Haying this year was not an easy thing to do. Having left my full time work to farm full time, one might expect it would be easy to follow the weather and hay while the sun shines. Not so! The haying season of 2019 was adversely affected by very strange weather from April to August! When the snow disappeared, we had our classic dry spell, perfect for drying out fields and preparing to plant crops. We waited for rain until July where we recieved almost 7 inches of rain over three weeks! Grasses? Well, not very much grass but more wildflowers that were drought tolerant. The rain caused the grasses to grow up, but a few weeks behind schedule.
So haying was patchy at best as we could only do select work where the fields were allowing. This gave us about two tons of hay by mid July.
Once into August, it was very difficult to find a three day haying window. In fact, we raked a field five times because of rain showers that didn't allow for suitable drying. This caused the hay to rust, drove the tractor time and cost up for what ended up being 1.5 tonnes of low grade feed hay.
Our final shot at haying gave a very nice quality of hay, about 5 tonnes of high grade feed hay. Normally, the same field would give 6 - 7 tonnes per cut, so hay is an in-demand product this year. In this particular field, we switched brands of Sisal twine (biodegradable twine made from plant fibre). The new brand would not run through the baler needles unless it was started by hand. This cost alot of time in the field. The upshot was, our neighbours wanted to watch the bales being made, so when things came to a halt, they both got out of the car, rolled up their sleeves and helped get things going again. He is a retired dairy farmer, so not a stranger to baling hay! Thanks Bernie and Cris!
Next article will cover our market experiences, thanks for reading today!
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